Opera Europa’s spring forum in Zagreb has been postponed to 24-26 September, and the programme will be slightly revised in view of current events.
In the meantime, our keynote speaker Chris Denby, CEO of the Advisory Board for the Arts, hosted a Zoom Webinar on the theme of The New Loyals on Thursday 26 March at 14.30 CET.
The full presentation is now available here
Recovering from the worldwide COVID-19 crisis will require unprecedented actions especially to rebuild existing audiences and attract new audiences. Opera companies will have to think well beyond their traditional approaches to audience development, which have only gone so far even in the relatively strong economies of the past decade.
To help participants with this daunting task, The Advisory Board for the Arts will share early findings from its major 2020 research Initiative, The New Loyals, which proposes a different approach to building audiences. Unlike most audience-building efforts, which rely largely on well-marketed, innovative programming, our initiative focuses on identifying and satisfying audience motivations for attendance. Once we know the various reasons why audiences are attending, we can build welcoming experiences--across all customer touch-points--that help them satisfy their diverse objectives. Our approach necessarily engages the entire organization in providing a sweeping, redesigned, end-to-end service experience.
Resilience in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis will require that we try new ideas. This presentation will describe ABA’s work to adapt to the arts world highly successful approaches from other industries as well as best practices in finding new, loyal audiences that will sustain opera companies into the future.